Please Excuse Our Dust: AOL Editors' Blogs Page

Hi folks -- I've been pushing words and links around like crazy today; spent a good bunch of this afternoon under the hood of the AOL Editors' Blogs page, which is way, way overdue for an overhaul.

You know, to make it somewhat useful.

The first step is to just update the listings, which are woefully out of date (my fault), mercilessly whacking the ones that haven't been updated for a while.

This means that some categories will be incredibly long, and others will be really short, so the page will be hellaciously ugly and hard to read for a while.

This is only temporary, though, because the plan is to move all the static listings into a directory module that takes up less space and is easier to browse.

What to do with the extra space? Primarily include more feed display modules, which will display summaries of the most recent entries of a particular blog (pulling from that blog's feed). This means I'll be able to highlight more blog content without doing a whole lot of extra work. I like the sound of that.

Category-wise, I'm in the process of adding some new categories. I also have to figure out what to do with the AOL employee blogs that aren't quite "official", but are still pretty interesting and useful.

Now, normally, all this would happen behind the scenes, copying over stuff to test pages and whatnot, but the Editor's Blogs page is pretty low-traffic, and I figured that an ugly update was better than a well laid-out (but inaccurate) status quo.

Thanks -- Joe